Woodpeckers are Enchanting Birds

Downy woodpeckers (Picoides pubescens) and Hairy Woodpeckers (Picoides villosis) grace bird feeders year round, over most of North America, excluding the Northern tundra & far south-western United States and Mexico.  In Eastern Ontario, we need only hang a bit of suet from the sleeping lilac branch in winter to win the friendship of these gregarious, enchanting birds.  A few shelled peanuts added to the feeder offerings will earn their undying patronage as well.

The bills of both birds are chisel-like and designed for the excavation of grubs and boring insects which burrow into the cambium layer beneath the outer bark of trees.  It might be noted that when the cambium layer of a tree is severely injured, the tree dies and thus many woodpeckers in a forest is an indication of a healthy forest.  Wood peckers will climb trees in a spiral ascent backing down every now and then to peruse crevices they may have missed.  Biologists believe that by tapping with their bills and listening (with evidently acute hearing) to the reverberation, they can determine where insects are at work under stout tree bark.   Their long claws do not detract from their handsome appearance in the least.  It is a marvel to watch woodpeckers scale a tree with surefooted prowess.

Their merry tribe tends to band together with those other little minstrels of the wood, the Chickadees.  The Nuthatch will also lend his voice, a bass “yank, yank” to the forest songster’s refrain.  The cross country skier travelling along side the hedgerow will undoubtedly encounter the musical quartet of chickadee, nuthatch, Hairy and Downy woodpeckers.  It seems to this skier that I am a welcome friend. 

The woodpeckers take their cue from the chickadee and fly from tree to tree just a little ahead of the skier.   The sound of the woodpecker in flight is unmistakable once initially identified.  Something in the airfoil around his wings is distinctly different to the sound of other birds in flight.  The Downy woodpecker’s undulating flight might be characterized as flying scallops through the air.

Long years ago, the family dog, a Lab mix, emulated the woodpecker’s flight by leaping along a path in the bird’s wake. It became a long standing ritual and human spectators were amazed.  The woodpecker seemed to enjoy the interspecies banter sometimes nearly alighting on the dog’s nose.  Hard to believe but true--if only video cameras had been available in those days.  

The woodpecker excavates nesting sites as high as 50 feet, in the trunks of mature, very often dead, trees.  By virtue of his larger size, the Hairy woodpecker must find a mature stand of woods.  It can be challenging for woodpeckers to find nesting sites, particularly when many of us think that clearing dead wood from our woodlots is just good forest management.

 

Both Downy and Hairy woodpeckers lay 5 to 7 eggs.   For two weeks, both parents incubate the white eggs.  The Downy fledglings leave the nest after approximately two weeks, while their larger cousins fledge the nest at more than four weeks.

In Swedish, the woodpecker is called Ragnfagel which translates to Rain bird, possibly because the smaller woodpecker’s tap-tapping on hollow trees has a resonant quality that sounds like raindrops on the wooden surfaces of inverted oaken buckets and casks and barrels, the vessels of the our forefathers when bird nomenclature was evolving.  It is also thought that the larger woodpecker’s drumming was equated with Oden and the sounds of thunder.  Certainly on the dreariest of days, woodpeckers can often be found at an offering of suet, bringing a little sunshine into the hearts of bird watchers.